Tests find diabetes early

Press, 17 February 1983, Page 12

Tests find diabetes early

NZPA Washington A New Zealand doctor. Professor Robert Elliott, who returned to Auckland last month after working in Canada on diabetes in children, has said, “We need to find some way of picking up diabetes before it gets so far that insulin has to be given.” A team of Boston doctors reported last week that they had discovered that people destined to develop one form of diabetes showed indications of their susceptibility long before the disease struck. Dr Elliott, a professor at the Auckland Medical School, said on his return from Toronto that his research with rats showed that a high protein diet u?ould be the triggering factor for diabetes in children. In the “New England Journal of Medicine,” the Boston doctors reported the results

of an unusual 36 years of study. The team used a pair of identical twins and identical triplets to monitor insulindependent diabetes, a form that accounts for some 15 per cent of the eight million diabetes cases in the United States. The doctors said that their work showed that antiobodies in the body’s immune system began attacking insulin producing beta cells up to eight years before the diabetes became obvious. With the twins and the triplets, one from each set was obviously diabetic. The doctors spent the remaining years checking the others to see if they would come down with the disease: the other twin, did, and so did one of the triplets. They found the beta cells of the two who eventually came down with the disease

were under attack by the immune system long before the standard symptoms of diabetes appeared but that the immune system of the third triplet did not attack the beta cells. An editorial in the journal said the study would allow doctors to entertain the hope of detecting people who would come down with diabetes, and by treating them with drugs to prevent its development. This cbuld be dangerous, however, the editorial said, because the drugs would supress the immune system, leading to greater susceptibility to other illnesses. In transplant recipients whose immune systems are repressed by drugs the risk of cancer is 100 times greater than among the normal population.